Variously interpreted as a political analogy, religious metaphor, fishing encomium, and natural history tract, Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton’s The Compleat Angler has been continually in print since its initial publication in 1653.
Are you afraid of insects? Probably not likely as you’re reading a website dedicated to books about natural history; however many are – even, paradoxically, some of the very people who study them.
Discovered in 1837 in Guiana and named for the newly crowned Queen Victoria of England, Victoria regia – the enormous Amazonian water lily now known as Victoria amazonica – became the botanical obsession of Victorian England.
For as long as its existence has been known, the frozen continent at the bottom of the world has variously been the much sought-after prize of explorers, scientists, conservationists and politicians; often at the same time.